Recognizing the differences between siblings

Asha Dornfest, Author of Minimalist Parenting, shares advice for parents on how to recognize the differences between siblings and then customize parenting, discipline, and love for each
Importance of Recognizing The Differences Between Siblings
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Recognizing the differences between siblings

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If you're like me, when you had your 2nd child maybe you felt a little confident like you know I got this, I think I can do this. And then your 2nd child comes along and you realize, it's non transferable knowledge. I don't know anything. I have 2 extremely different children and parenting them really is sort of like 2 separate jobs. They both need very different things from me as a parent. They need different things in terms of disciple. They need different things in terms of communication. And I've had to learn that over the years. The advise that I would give any parent who has more than one child with different temperaments is to stand back and observe. An example of - this is a very like literal example; when my son was a baby, I would feed him and it was fine and if he was still hungry, he would howl. The entire neighborhood would know that he was hungry. So it was very obvious when my son needed more food or needed more milk or whatever. And so I just assume that this is what babies do. Babies cry when they are hungry. So my daughter came along and she was very quiet, very serene baby. There was a period of time where she wasn't growing at the rate that she probably should have been growing and she was also sucking her thumb more vigorously than she was before. But otherwise, she was fine, she smiles, shew wasn't crying at all. It was only about a month into that I realized she was really hungry. She actually wasn't getting enough milk or enough nourishment and I had no idea because I had just assumed that based on my past parenting experience, she would howl and scream and cry when she was hungry but that's not how she communicated her hunger to me. And so I had to learn a new way of communicating with her and realize that she was going to take a different set of parenting skills from me.

Asha Dornfest, Author of Minimalist Parenting, shares advice for parents on how to recognize the differences between siblings and then customize parenting, discipline, and love for each

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Asha Dornfest

Author of Minimalist Parenting

Asha Dornfest is the co-author of Minimalist Parenting: Enjoy Modern Family Life More By Doing Less, and the founder of Parent Hacks, an award-winning website devoted to sharing “forehead-smackingly smart” parenting advice. Since its launch in 2005, Parent Hacks has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Real Simple, Family Circle, and Parents, and has been named the “#1 Most Useful” of Babble’s Top 50 Mom Blogs three of the four years the honor has been given. Nielsen named Asha one of its 16 influential “Power Pack Moms,” and she has appeared in several TV and video broadcasts including CNN and ABC News Now. Asha lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.

 

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